The multi-layered realityverse that I have been talking about is hardly original with me, as I've tried to show with my references to shamanism and Gnosticism. In the twentieth century, there were new approaches to the idea, for instance the idea of the "Noosphere," a level of existence created and sustained by conscious beings. The Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin tried to make something spiritual and progressive out of it, with moderate success, but his efforts are all but forgotten nowadays. The most prevalent paradigm of the multiverse these days comes not from philosophy or physics, but from the Internet which brings you this very article. That is, "virtual reality."

Just about anyone who knows how to read or talk over a telephone has encountered "virtual reality," in its simplest form as a presence mediated by print or electricity. With the Internet and the fast-growing web of global communications, the Noosphere seems to be taking up an electronic existence. Physical people, mostly younger ones, are living in a multiplicity of worlds, only one of which is physical. They live in "massively multi-player online role-playing games" such as "World of Warcraft" or "Second Life" where they represent themselves with fantasy characters ironically called "avatars" (borrowed from the Hindu word for an incarnation of a god). Simpler forms of virtual reality are Websites, e-mail, Weblogs like this one, and "chatrooms," where people type in their conversations and reply in real-time.

I don't need to explain this to anyone under the age of 30, but those who might be reading this may be over 30 and have no idea that these things even exist. And as for philosophers, humanists, and many mathematicians, if they are part of the academic establishment, all of this is beneath them. Internet itself, let alone the various virtual realities it hosts, is the realm of fantasy-ridden children, idiot slacker students, and perverts. Academics, at least the ones I know in the humanities, must use Internet, and even buy things over it, but they do it reluctantly, as if it were something dirty (as sometimes it is!). The scientists have a few more clues, after all, the Net was invented by them, but they are only now beginning to see the use of Weblogs and other virtual forms of existence in their attempts to reach people other than in their own specialized communities.

So if you are still reading this, you are now probably aware that the Noosphere has happened, not by the creation of God, but by the ingenuity and desires of human beings. So where does God fit in here? Is the Divine just another layer in this big reality pastry?

Unless you are a Christian or a member of one of the many sects of Hinduism, you do not believe that God became incarnate (like an Avatar) in the physical world. God can give direct revelation to a human being (as Jews and Muslims believe) or God can communicate directly with human beings in prayer (as most religions believe), but God isn't likely to show up as a physical person any time soon (at least until the Christian Second Coming, and maybe not even then). This makes divine existence, for better or worse, a non-physical existence. How is this non-physical divine and spiritual existence mediated to us? It has to be through the very consciousness that also brings us the world of virtual presences, whether through words, stories, art, music, or any other form of presentation.

I already admitted back a couple of posts ago that for atheist scientists, this is all irrelevant. Their world is composed of physical existences which can be studied, analyzed, proved or disproved by experiment. Sure, they live in the same world that you and I do, with all those un-provable, irrational, un-analyzable realities, and some of them, for all I know, play "World of Warcraft" or other games like it. But for them, it's easier to tell the difference between real and imaginary. They don't give "imaginary" things, including religious things, the honor of being "real." But I do.

Religion uses stories, legends, images, parables, and symbols to get its message across. It uses, to use a general word, mythology. Now many Christians, especially the fundamentalist kind, are shocked to hear their religion called "mythology," but as the saying goes, "Your religion is revelation (or enlightenment), someone else's is mythology." The concept of mythology has been debased in our culture to a kind of spiritual screenplay, but mythology, like the "shamanic reality," is one of the ways in which the divine makes itself present. The one thing it is NOT required to be, at least for non-fundamentalists, is literal reporting of events.

Bizarre and terrible things happen in myths, as anyone who knows Greek or Norse mythology can attest. Bizarre and terrible things happen in the Bible, too, as well as in most other religious writings. Beautiful and glorious and uplifting things happen as well. Religious writings, if you have been following this, exist in the realm of Mythworld. It is a virtual reality. It is reached by another mode of consciousness, which may overlay ordinary reality simultaneously. In Mythworld, when weird things happen that contradict the laws of physics, you don't get out your calculator to prove that they can't happen. You pay attention to what they are trying to tell you. In Mythworld, everything is symbolic. It means what it looks like, but it also means what the author, or divine author, is trying to symbolize and teach.

The problem comes when the levels of reality are not kept separate. A fundamentalist uses the tools of rationalism (useful in one reality) to try to explain myth (in another reality) literally. Or, in the other direction, the tools of rationalism are used to disprove mythic events, in the hope that the myth will just go away. There is little that non-fundamentalists (or non-atheists) can do to convince these people. I seriously doubt that anyone of a fundamentalist type of mind is reading this anyway. All of this rambling about reality has been my attempt to place myself in the dialogue between science and religion, in the hope that I may honestly participate in both.

My next and last post in this series will be about how I personally navigate my way among the many realities, and how I view religion and the Divine, as well as the truly fundamental things of science and mathematics.

Posted at 2:18 am | link